Is Dipesh Chakrabarty stupider than Amartya Sen?

Can Dipesh Charkabarty say something stupider than Amartya Sen? Let us see- 

‘Identity’ relates to our own sense of self in everyday life.

No. Identity is not a function of self of self. I may find it useful to have a sense of self as a smart and sassy African American woman.  'What would Oprah do?' is my motto. But I know my identity is that of an elderly Tamil man. 

It is by nature complex and allows for plural affiliations.

We may have multiple senses of self. These may be very complex indeed and lead to all sorts of seemingly incompatible affiliations. In my Oprah mode I like Prince Harry. In propria persona, I think he is a silly-billy.  However I have a single identity tied to my physical body. The same is true of a person with multiple personality disorder. 

Human beings, I agree with Sen, cannot live otherwise.

Sure they can. Busy people doing important work they find fascinating are likely to have a sense of self highly congruent with their identity. Out of modesty or the desire to seem ordinary they may pretend otherwise.  

I have no problem accepting the proposition that all functioning human beings have plural, if incipient, understandings of themselves, derived from the various roles and contexts  they inhabit and the exchanges they engage in everyday life.

But the proposition is non-informative. We gain nothing by accepting it and lose nothing by rejecting it.  

Identity thus has to do with my own understanding and thus with my interiority.

Depending on how you define 'functioning', Identity has nothing to do with understanding or interiority.  Our thinking does involve being able to imagine oneself under various different states of the world. But this does not entail any 'pluralism' regarding our own identity. We continue to be who we are even when our plans don't work out or some fortune or misfortune befalls us. It is merely a manner of speaking to say that there is a thin man inside every fat man struggling to get out or that every hobo has a billionaire inside him or vice versa. 

I carry it within myself.

You can remember your own name and your PIN number. Cool.  

‘Identification’, however, refers to the external and surface signs by which I or others might identify myself as a member of a particular group:

No. Identification may or may not have to do with external signs. It could be on the basis of fingerprints or DNA. 

my skull cap, my turban, my beard, my name, my clothes, my circumcised or uncircumcised penis.

In India, fewer and fewer people show these external signs. When they do so, it is for the same purpose that gang members display certain colors or tattoos. Also penises are not generally displayed to all and sundry though Dipesh may not be aware of this fact. Still, it is a defense against a 'Me Too' charge. 'Madam, I iz from Indiya. We are displaying uncircumcised penis to assert religious identity. Mind it kindly.' 

There is clearly a relationship between identity and identification but one can separate them out for analytical purposes.

Technology can give us better means of identification. Dipesh's 'analytical purposes' are time wasting nonsense.  

I may or may not be an observing Muslim, and that may be critical to my own identity, but is not necessarily critical to how I am identified.

But it might be.  

Anecdotes or ethnographic accounts of the mass psychology of rioting in the subcontinent always show this process of identification (of the Muslim or the Hindu) overriding issues of identity during the charged, frenzied and lunatic conditions of mass murder, rape, pillage and burning.

Very true. Hindu Jain riots are characterized by....urm... nothing at all. Why? Because they don't happen.  

People are killed not because of their identities but because of the way they are identified.

No they are killed because of their identity after some identification process unless it is the Army or Police who are opening fire.  

That this is not hair splitting will be clear if we look, for example, at the butchery of Muslims by Hindu crowds (organized by Hindu extremist organizations and political leaders)

Non-Hindus participated with vim and vigor. No one really likes Muslim terrorists.  

in Gujarat in February 2002. About a thousand Muslims were tortured and killed – and tens of thousands rendered homeless – in retaliation for an attack on pilgrims on a train in which about 58 Hindus, many of them women and children, had been burnt to death.

America killed 1.3 million Muslims in retaliation for 9/11.  

The Hindustan Times of 4 March 2002 reported the case of a Muslim boy who had been left for dead by Hindu assailants. Brought to a hospital by a passerby who found him ‘badly burnt’ on the street, the boy refused to give his Muslim name to the hospital authority as he was clearly afraid of the features by which he could be identified as a Muslim.

This was also the reason he wasn't incessantly displaying his circumcised penis.  

He wanted to be called by a Hindu name, Prasad. ‘Bataa sale kya hai, Hindu ya mian’ – ‘Tell us, you bastard, what are you: Hindu or Muslim?’ – the thugs had demanded of Prasad’s family on Ring Road.

Why were these Gujaratis speaking in Hindi? Was it because the reporter didn't know Gujerati and was just making up this story?  The fact is people whose name was Prasad were butchered by Muslims because they were 'kuffar'. 

The mob wanted to take their pants off to see if they were circumcised.

Dipesh whips out his cock at any and every opportunity. 

But they did not need to: ‘one among the mob had got his hands on an identity card

Identity cards only exist because identity is singular.  

bearing Prasad’s brother’s [Muslim] name . . . “Arrey, mian hai, mian” [“Hey, he is a Muslim!”], he had exulted in murderous triumph’, and the butchery followed. (Here’s a clear case where ‘identification card’ would be an apt usage.)

Because identity really is singular. However, one can convert. This 'Prasad' could have chanted Hanuman Chalisa and said he'd done 'shuddhi' at the Arya Samaj. 

Even visitors who came to the hospital to see Prasad would not give their Muslim names.

Islam permits any type of name provided it has no derogatory meaning. Why do Indian Muslims prefer Arabic or Persian names? There are plenty of Turks and Iranians who retain pre-Islamic names as do Indonesians. What made India different? Answer this question and you answer many other questions- e.g. why Partition occurred. The fact is there has been population exchange- e.g. Kashmiri Pundits having to flee the Valley. In an overpopulated country, land and livelihoods are scarce. Tackling scarcity not talking bollocks about multiple identities is the only thing which can improve things.  

It does not mean that they had forgotten their identities.

It does mean that they understood that minorities must not run amok because they get stomped quickly enough. 

There is no reason to assume that they had forgotten the complex sense of identity that marked ‘normal’ everyday life.

Which for the Muslims in Godhra involved killing Hindu pilgrims. 

But they were scared of being identified as Muslims in the same way that many Jewish families in Nazi Europe tried to save themselves by repressing things that would mark them off as Jews. Prasad pleaded with his doctors to address him as a Hindu: ‘They will kill me if they find out I survived. Don’t tell anyone I am a Muslim, I beg of you’.

Did Jews in Germany massacre Christian pilgrims? Why does Dipesh play the Hitler card? It is Islam which has done and is doing ethnic cleansing. The percentage of Muslims in Gujarat has not fallen. 

Or take the case of Hindu shopkeepers in Ahmedabad and Vadodara who, to escape overnight looting and burning of their shops by Hindu rioters, painted images of Hindu gods on their ‘rusted shutters’ or hung boards proclaiming: ‘This shop belongs to a Hindu’.

The pilgrims massacred at Godhra were Hindus and were identified as such. Dipesh prefers to display his penis. Different strokes for different folks- right?

As with the so-called identity cards, signs on shops are not markers of identities; they are means of identification.

No. They serve an advertising and marketing purpose. A shop which declares itself to be 'Super-deluxe' isn't necessarily anything of the sort.  

Clearly, what was at issue in this instance was how these shops were going to be identified by the rioters, not the actual identities of the owners of the shops.

If it actually happened.  

What I am saying here will not, I suspect, surprise Sen. He will be as aware of these processes as anyone else. Why, then, does he still hope that the armoury of conceptual clarity that he deploys against the confused thinking of a Huntington would also act as an antidote to ‘the turmoil and barbarity we see around us’ generally?

Sen is stupider than Huntington. The remedy for 'turmoil and barbarity' is having an effective and well funded police service and legal system. It isn't talking bollocks about Multiple Identity. On the other hand, to get tax payers to pay 'the price of Civilization', the civilization being offered must be one they want, not some shit invented by an Ivory Tower Professor. Civilizations may or may not clash. But academic debates are a dialogue of the deaf.  

To the extent that Sen has things to say about religion and its place in public life in democracies, about the need to strengthen civil society organizations by making them inclusive and non-racist, he, of course, offers us reasons for hope.

No he doesn't. Civil Society organizations can quickly succumb to virulent wokeness. Competitive virtue signalling causes a backlash against 'epistocracies'. There was a time when Amnesty International was respected. Now we expect nothing from them except anti-Semitic bile and the glorification of terrorists.  

But, for all his humanism, Sen’s rationalism takes very  little note of the actual ethnographic processes – those non-rational social-psychological processes (such as the making of scapegoats) – that accompany ethnic massacres, religious wars and other related acts of violence.

Those ethnographic processes are irrelevant. Getting the mechanism design right and ensuring rapid catch-up growth is the only thing that works.  

Sen discerns our conceptual confusion

there can be no greater conceptual confusion than the notion that Identity can be multiple rather than saying it is multiply realizable.  

as an important factor in the causation of ethnic violence and hence advocated conceptual clarity on questions of identity as an antidote to the communalist poison.

Very true. Explaining to a bearded jihadi that he has another identity as a Gay Yoga instructor in San Francisco will make the world a better place- because the dude will kill you.  

But I am not sure that murderous mobs labour under ‘conceptual disarray’ in the same way that a Jihadist group or academics may.

So Jihadist groups are the equal of academics like Dipesh. But Jihadists could end up very rich and in control of strategic territory. Academics can only fuck up the life-chances of their students.  

The conceptual and cognitive processes that accompany frenzied moments of ethnic cleansing or communal carnage appear to call for the inclusion of some ethnographic insights into Sen’s rationalist optics.

But the thing is not ethnographic at all. It is the sort of thing criminologists study. Police forces need to be able to predict when these things might turn sour and to take preventive action. If you look at how the British police tackle football violence, there are obvious similarities with how the Indian police tackle potential communal violence. The difference is that the Indians have more legal options- e.g. externment, preventive detention etc. 

Mobs running amok are a nuisance. Nuisances can be curbed easily enough The fact that they exist doesn't mean philosophers need to stick in their oar. However, there are some exceptions to this rule.  Consider the nuisance created when 'flash mobs' assemble to shit on a particular stretch of the highway. The only proper way to tackle the underlying problem is by considering the ethnography of the epistemology of the ontology of the scotomization of subaltern savants sodomizing a Provincialized Europe.